SUDBURY - In the hours immediately after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, parents endured a torment that shouldn't have been necessary, said Michele Gay.

"We had parents in the room with us thinking they had lost their children," the Sudbury resident said. "Those were some long hours."

In fact, many of their kids had already been picked up by neighbors, who had no easy way to notify their families. Teachers, too, were mostly helpless after reaching a reunification point with their students following the chaos, with no information about the shooter, no phone numbers, and even no way to check attendance, Gay said.

Gay's own daughter, Josephine, was one of 20 students killed that day, along with six school staff members. Since moving from Newtown almost a year ago, the mother has been a champion of making schools safer, and now can claim a major role in bringing a novel security program to her two daughters' new district that aims to eliminate some of the panic that gripped parents and educators at Sandy Hook.

This week, Sudbury will become the first town in Massachusetts to be equipped with the new system, called NaviGate Prepared, which was launched a year ago by Ohio-based Lauren Innovations. The company is donating the program, a cloud-based emergency information management system, to the town on behalf of the Gay family; it will be installed at all of the K-8 schools, Lincoln-Sudbury High School, and four municipal buildings.

The product, which retails for $3,000 for a district the size of Sudbury, creates a secure, virtual database of schools' emergency response protocol, call lists, and other information that can be accessed immediately by people in the building and public safety officials through any Internet-connected device. In addition, the program provides an interactive map of each facility with 360-degree photos of every room.

The intent, said company representative Thom Jones, is to provide "peace of mind" to school staff, who would rather be focusing on their students in a crisis than running back to their offices to rummage through a binder of emergency information.

Having instant access to building data will also be a valuable resource for first responders, said Sudbury Police Chief Scott Nix, who worked with Gay to bring NaviGate Prepared to Sudbury. Being able to quickly update information within the system will be especially handy, he said, adding some of the town's records haven't been brought up to date in seven years.

Gay, who made contact with Lauren Innovations through her work with Safe and Sound, a school safety organization she founded after the Sandy Hook slayings, said Sudbury overall has demonstrated a strong commitment to school security. When her family was preparing to move to town shortly after the Newtown shootings, she said, "One of the questions that stood out in my mind first was, 'Are we going to be safe?'"

Page 2 of 2 - "We feel really blessed to be in this community," she said, adding the openness of Nix in particular "gave me confidence that we have leaders who are taking safety in the schools seriously."

Nix, who was working in the police department in 2007 when Lincoln-Sudbury experienced a tragedy of its own, a fatal student-on-student stabbing, said the issue "has always been in my heart."

"We want to make sure we do the right thing for the residents," he said, adding he believes the town's latest tool will be "very powerful and advantageous for law enforcement as well as school officials."

Scott O'Connell can be reached at 508-626-4449 or soconnell@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter: @ScottOConnellMW